Grassley Questions Stanford Psychiatrist’s Industry Ties
Chuck Grassley is at it again. The senator from Iowa is looking into a Stanford psychiatry professor’s multimillion-dollar stake in a drug company called Corcept Therapeutics.
Alan Schatzberg, who heads Stanford’s psych department, followed the university’s rules and reported having a stake of more than $100,000 in the company. According to Grassley, Schatzberg’s total stake in the company may be worth some $6 million.
“Obviously, $6 million is a dramatically higher number than $100,000 and I am concerned that Stanford may not have been able to adequately monitor the degree of Dr. Schatzberg’s conflicts of interest with its current disclosure policies and submit to you that these policies should be re-examined,” Grassley wrote in a letter to Stanford’s president.
Corcept is studying the drug mifepristone to treat psychotic depression; Schatzberg is listed as the principal investigator on an NIH-funded study of mifepristone.
In a statement, Stanford said Schatzberg “has fully complied with the university’s rigorous conflict of interest policy.” The university added that “appropriate and well-managed interactions between industry and academic medicine are critical to finding new therapies.”
Grassley, a Republican, has been looking into docs’ financial ties for a while, and he’s been pushing a bill that would require disclosure of industry payments to doctors.
His letter, which was introduced into the Congressional Record yesterday, is online here. Stanford’s response is online here.
Update: In an a second statement, Stanford said that as part of a conflict-of-interest review, “Schatzberg did disclose in writing his ownership of the Corcept stock and its actual value, so Stanford did know the value of his stock based on his disclosures to the university.”
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